Wow - it's already almost May. That means a couple of things. As of today, we're 1 month away from our Japan trip and school will be entering the last month before Summer. I don't know where the first 4 months of 2023 went, but anyway.
We're finishing up the last few bits of things we need to take care of before our trip. The biggest thing left, both logistically and expense-related, are the JR Pass tickets for each of us. We decided to go with the official JR Pass issuer who is literally the JR train group. This route is a little more expensive but it gives you the ability to reserve shinkansen tickets online, which is a little convenience. I did learn that if you buy from them directly, you don't get vouchers that you then need to take to Japan to exchange for the actual tickets. You can just take your e-mail or whatever and get it at the airport. I think that's good because it's one less thing to manage/lose. I'm still afraid that we're gonna lose a JR ticket or something sometime because I didn't know that they made the change from a little passport-like pass thing to just regular, tiny square pieces of paper that resemble a train ticket. Laura will be managing them at each station because the kids will just lose it and they don't re-issue tickets so we would end up having to pay for all the tickets, which defeats the purpose of the pass.
I think other than that and a couple little website travel registrations for customs and stuff, we're ready to go. We have all the hotels and stays booked and hopefully confirmed. The airline tickets are good still, though I saw that the flight is completely booked. Oh, about that. Alaska Airlines decided to increase points redemption totals for business class a month or so ago without notice. They increased the points required from 60k one-way to 80k, so basically, it would require I think like 80k more points total to even start to try at upgrading to business, which was like an additional $1600. We said no at this point. Plus, I don't think we could have anyway because the flight is full. Anyway, it'll be coach there and business back, which I think is fine. Being able to relax on the way back after we're all tired is better, I think.
I'm still worried about my ability to talk Japanese there. I haven't used it in so long and I often have trouble trying to find the right words even when just talking to my Mom.
Other than the fact that the kids have WAY too many things going on at the moment, like 3-5 things each, things are chugging along, though it's getting me a bit stressed. We're literally driving from thing to thing every day and missing some things because of overlap. After a week or two, things die down, but still busy until we get back from Japan. Then Connor has a week-long scout camp or something right after. He's gonna be so tired.
That's it for now. At this rate, the next blog might be after our trip...